Adaptive Gateway Discovery for Load Distribution in Hybrid Wireless Networks

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) have a limitation in information transmission capability since nodes in the network cannot communicate with any nodes in another network. Hybrid Wireless Networks (HWNs) is proposed for connecting MANETs to another network through gateway nodes that act as a bridge between the networks. Limited energy resource to HWNs is a challenging issue. If a source node selects a gateway and a route to it without considering the available energy of relay nodes, the probability of route breakage may increase leading to network instability and network partition problem. In order to mitigate these problems, an effective load balancing algorithm should be applied to HWNs. In this paper, we propose an adaptive gateway discovery algorithm aimed to create a well-balanced network. We also propose using a directional flooding technique to alleviate the drawback of load balancing information flood. Simulation results show that our protocol distributes the workload to mobile nodes more evenly. As a result, our protocol further extends the network lifetime without sacrificing the network performance when compared to the existing protocols.